Agency authors, Casey Watson and Cathy Glass, continue their stint in the best seller list - Cathy Glass for the last nine weeks - respectively at number 6 and number 7 in paperback non-fiction with only 262 copies separating their sales this week.

Katharine Quarmby has won the Literature category of the Ability Media International Awards for her book on disability hate crime Scapegoat.

The Awards, which are now in their thirdyear(www.amiawards.org), were developed, as part of the ongoing work of Leonard Cheshire Disability, to indentify and celebrate outstandingly creative achievements that promotes a more inclusive world for people with disabilities. As such the awards acknowledged both disabled and non-disabled individuals who are champions in this field and have demonstrated high achievement and outstanding creativity in their work.

Previous winners have included the novelist Sue Townsend, the journalists Peter White and Frank Gardner and such organisations as the Royal Shakespeare Company, the English National Opera and the Donmar Warehouse.

The Independent on Sunday then ran a story on 13th November on agency submissions.

Literary editors receive some strange messages – PRs misaddressing emails to the wrong newspaper, out-of-work writers demanding reviewing work with menaces, or authors wanting us to read their self-published conspiracy theories that no publisher will touch because they are “afraid of the truth” – but they’re nothing, it seems, compared to the postbag of a literary agent. Andrew Lownie has been in touch, directing me to the website of his agency, which specialises in history and biography (not poetry and short stories, aspiring writers please note) and has a list of handy tips for authors wishing to submit their masterpieces. Among the tips are many we agree with, including: “My rule is that the longer the parcel takes to open, the quicker it is to discard. Anything with too much sellotape and staples suggests a mad person.” Here at IoS Towers, the longer a book takes to unwrap, the less interesting it inevitably is. Another is: “Address the agent correctly.” He’s right: for a person who claims to be a writer or reviewer, for whom spelling and attention to detail are quite important, getting the addressees name right is particularly important. Mr Lownie tells us that he has recently been addressed as: Hello dear Andrew; Dear Mr Townie; Hello Angel; Dear Mr. Dolby; Top of the day to you; and Do your current interests include ferociously paced, commercial Tartan Noir? His correspondents have signed off, variously: In His Holy Name; PLEAS CONTACT ME FOR FUTURE TALK; Artistically Yours; If there’s a zombie apocalypse, good luck!; and i need to get published man. hope to hear from you guys. Peace. If you have recently sent a submission to the agency including one of the above, then sorry, but it doesn’t look like you’re going to be published any time soon. Please, though, don’t call us.

Irreverent military gossip website, the Army Rumour Service - ARRSE for short - has been entertaining the defence community for over a decade. Now the forum has its own spin-off book, described as an insider’s guide to the British Army and published today. Author Major Des Astor told British Forces News what readers could expect.

Cathy Glass’s current best seller The Night the Angels Came, published a few weeks ago, has fifty 5 * Amazon reviews and one rogue 1 4* which must surely be a record. Her first book Damaged has eighty one 5* reviews but eleven 4, two 3 and one 2*.